Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a neurological disorder that is still very difficult to diagnose despite the recent advances in medicine. This is mainly because MS is characterised by a wide range of symptoms that vary between individual patients. Moreover, there is still no single test that exists to accurately diagnose MS which means that people with MS can often be misdiagnosed or receive their diagnosis many years after first symptoms develop. As such, there is a constant need for new tools to identify and monitor people living with MS or who may develop MS.
We have been working on a number of new approaches to identify people with MS and one of these approaches is using online cognitive testing. Cognitive testing involves measuring someone’s cognitive abilities i.e their memory, attention and ability to process information amongst others. We think that through cognitive testing, we can identify patterns of abnormalities that could be indicative of MS and could help us identify people with MS from people who don’t have MS. Similarly, we want to investigate whether MRI scans are another feasible tool to identify people with MS.